Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information- and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while eliciting the buyers' types and imposing payments. We derive the welfare- and revenue-optimal mechanisms for a class of games with binary actions and states. Our results highlight the critical properties of selling information in competitive environments: (i) the negative externalities arising from buyer competition increase the profitability of recommending the correct action to one buyer exclusively; (ii) for the buyers to follow the seller's recommendations, the degree of exclusivity must be limited; (iii) the buyers' obedience constraints also limit the distortions in the allocation of information introduced by a monopolist seller; (iv) as competition becomes fiercer, these limitations become more severe, weakening the impact of market power on the allocation of information.
翻译:数据购买者在一场不完整信息游戏中竞争数据购买者数据,单一数据销售者拥有一些与报酬有关的信息。卖方面临一个共同的信息和机制设计问题:决定出售哪些信息,同时获取买方的类型和强制付款。我们为一类具有二元行动和状态的游戏建立了福利和收入最佳机制。我们的结果突出表明了在竞争环境中出售信息的关键特性:(一)买方竞争产生的负面外部效应增加了只向买方建议正确行动的好处;(二)买方要遵循卖方的建议,就必须限制排他性的程度;(三)买方的服从限制也限制了垄断卖方在信息分配上的扭曲;(四)随着竞争变得更加激烈,这些限制变得更加严重,削弱了市场力量对信息分配的影响。